Friday, March 3, 2017

There’s such a cowardice in euphemism

This isn’t a very long or substantive post.It won’t make any new arguments, and it won’t
refute arguments made by anyone else.I’m
just writing to call attention to something which angers me, in the hopes the
reader will start to notice it too: justhowmanyeuphemisms statists use to justify the
violence of the state.

The central insight of libertarianism is that all governance is violence.Most
people recognize on a fundamental level that violence is normally bad.If everyone recognized that all government is
violent, justifying government would be much more difficult, and the case for a
smaller government would be much easier to make.Accordingly, making the case for a bigger state usually requires you to
conceal or downplay the violence inherent in what you propose – sometimes, even
from yourself.This is why statists find
euphemisms so appealing: they make state solutions presentable in polite
company.

The military may be the clearest example of this, and as an
officer I’m exposed to even more of these euphemisms than the average American.At the tactical level, the heart of what we
do is kill people – let’s be real here – but we rarely use that word.We prefer to say we “eliminated the target(s),”
thereby abstracting the verb and dehumanizing the subject. We don’t even say we
shoot people, we’re just “engaging” the enemy.Engage! what a harmless sounding word! If we don’t kill enough people,
we go back to “mop-up” the area.If we
accidentally kill the wrong person, that’s just “collateral damage.” If we torture
someone, we’re just using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or even “physical
persuasion.”And don’t worry, that isn’t
a war crime – it’s just “extralegal.”

On the operational level, the folks being tortured are often
unlawfully imprisoned outside the US without due process of law, but we don’t
like to put it that way either; they’re merely “under protective custody” at an
“offshore internment facility.” On a strategic level, we don’t like the sound
of “killing foreign leaders who oppose us”, so we just call it “regime change.”In Vietnam, our napalm was merely a “defoliant”
– the casual reader would never know we were dropping fire-bombs on areas rife
with civilians.When Cambodian children
are blown up each year by the remnants of our carpet-bombing campaign, we frown
at the tragedy of “incontinent ordnance.”Even bureaucratically, the entire “Department of Defense” does hardly a
thing that directly defends American citizens.It originally had a more honest title: the Department of War.

Domestically, ICE agents don’t kidnap fathers from their
children, they merely deport undocumented aliens.DEA agents don’t kick down your door and
shoot your dog in the middle of the night - they just investigate leads of
potential illicit substance distributors.Policemen don’t kill black people, they just neutralize perceived threats
with lethal force.TSA agents don’t molest
you and steal your shampoo, they simply look for contraband and remove it.It’s all sterilized.The more technical the jargon, the easier it
is to stomach.

Taxation, of course, is the biggest example, as it underlies
everything the government does.Hardly a
day goes by without politicians saying something to the effect of “it’s high time we ask all Americans to pay
their fair share.” Of course, there’s no ASKING about it: taxes don’t work
that way.What they mean is that if you
don’t pay, they’ll steal your money, and then your car, and then your home, and
then your family’s possessions, eventually throw you in jail. Furthermore, what
share qualifies as fair (and why) is never specified; all the speaker means by
it is “more.”All of this relies on conceptions
of consent so abstract that they don’t
hold water in any other linguistic context.Statists roll their eyes at the famous “taxation is theft” meme, when really
we should roll our eyes to call it anything else.

This is all related to a separate problem I’ve described
before on this blog: people’s
unwillingness to enforce what they endorse.I’ve been lamenting it for years, but a few weeks ago a comedian I
follow named Jeremy McClellan articulated it more precisely than I ever have.In economics, he noted, there’s a difference
between people’s stated preferences and people’s revealed
preferences.Jeremy calls this the
difference between his Netflix queue (which
is full of documentaries about bees he told himself he wants to watch someday) and
his Netflix history (which is full of
re-watched old episodes of The Office or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia).In all walks of life, what we SAY we want is different from what our ACTIONS INDICATE we really want.Studies have proven this time and again.

Politics is no different, and that’s what makes the state so
dangerous.By normalizing and concealing
and dividing up the culpability for violence, politics becomes the outlet for
our stated preferences: our preachy virtue signaling on how other people ought
to live their lives.So long as the
dirty work of making it so is left to someone else, we’re all too happy
to VOICE our support for coercing disfavored groups into abidance by our
principles.But when it comes time to
walk the walk, our actions speak louder than our words. Our revealed preferences – as shown in our
market decisions, or in our day-to-day interactions with practitioners of those
same disfavored activities – are much kinder and more peaceful than our stated
preferences would indicate.The portion
of people who’ll vote to deport undocumented immigrants or lock up pot smokers is
vastly larger than the portion who will actually try to detain those
people themselves.

Euphemisms are a reaction to this dichotomy: a way for
people to pretend what they say is in
line with how they act.They enable doublethink on the part of
speaker and audience alike.In cases
where saying something plainly would offend our nobler sensibilities, euphemisms
shroud the ugly truth of the speaker’s idea for long enough that it doesn’t initially
raise any moral red flags, enabling us to believe two contradictory things at
the same time without realizing it (or at least, without admitting it to
others).

When the FDA bans an untested but promising AIDS drug, or
the DEA bans an untested but pleasant recreational drug, or a taxi regulator
bans Uber, or the school board bans homeschooling, or Congress bans
discrimination, or some licensing bureau bans certain hair stylists, or a mayor
bans untaxed cigarettes, or Evangelical senators ban abortion or prostitution, the
advocates of those bans rarely focus their advocacy on what should happen to
people who do it anyway.They prefer to dwell
on how great society could allegedly be were those taboo activities to simply
vanish – to lure us with the fantasy that with the stroke of a pen, the people
who formerly practiced such activities will instantly cease and desist.It’s inconvenient for them to acknowledge that
some will resist their moral imperialism, and even more uncomfortable for them
to confront the question of just how to deal with such people.

The state can only persist for so long as it’s advocates are
spared that confrontation.Lots of
people might think X is bad and wish fewer people did it, but far fewer
typically think it’s bad enough to
warrant imprisonment, and fewer still would be willing to enforce that penalty
themselves.If the state did not exist, plenty
of people would take it upon themselves to help the poor, or research drug safety,
or do any of the other important tasks that we tragically hand over to unaccountable
bureaucrats today. But hardly anyone
would take it upon themselves to start wars, deport immigrants, ban Muslims, arrest
pot-smokers, shut-down businesses or steal, because we are more tolerant in person
than we are behind the ballot box.

The first step to realizing that is to be honest with yourself
about what it is you are saying.There
are times when violence is justifiable.Smart
people can disagree about what those circumstances are, and if you have a
well-thought out opinion on that which differs from mine I totally respect
that.I will debate you in good faith
and take your arguments seriously – there are no easy answers in
philosophy.All I ask is that you at
least allow the debate to take place by acknowledging that the tradeoff exists.Don’t cower behind comforting platitudes or
numbing technical argot to convince yourself government is all hunky-dory
patriotic sunshine and rainbows.Being
wrong is forgivable; being a coward is insufferable.